Binary to ASCII Converter

Converting Binary to ASCII

Binary is the most basic language of computers. Everything, from simple text to full-length movies can be exepressed using binary. Computers use binary because it is a base 2 numbering system, in which each digit value has a value of one or zero. Thanks to the invention of the transistor, computers can represent binary numbers at an electronics level. Simple operations are implemented on the CPU and use binary values to compute.

Computers need a way to represent text. A computer's representation of text is called an encoding. The simplest encoding is ASCII, in which it represents each character as a byte (8 digit binary number), and thus can encode up to 127 (255 in its extended form) different characters.

However, ASCII does not cover Unicode characters, which include emojis and other non-latin characters. UTF-8 was created for this reason, and is the most common encoding type used today, supporting over one million Unicode code points. UTF-8 is used by the converter here to convert binary to Unicode. Unfortunately, its encoding and decoding process is complex enough that it cannot be covered here, so we'll stick to the basic 127 ASCII characters.

Converting binary to ASCII:

1. Each ASCII character is represented by one byte, so pad the binary string with zeroes so its length is a multiple of eight.
2. Split the binary string into chunks, with each chunk being eight digits long and thus one byte.
3. Working left to right, get the value of each binary byte using an ASCII table.
4. Get the completed message.

Example

Converting 11000110110111101100100011001012 to ASCII:

1. The binary string is one bit too short of being a multiple of eight. Insert a single zero at the beginning of the value.
   • 011000110110111101100100011001012
2. Split the string into byte chunks.
   • 011000112 011011112 011001002 011001012
3. Working left to right, decode using the table.
   • code

Pretty simple, huh?

ASCII Table